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It looks nice. Seems OIC has a lot to convey, which the site does,
and it appears well-organized. Of course, the proof is in the pudding,
that is, the experience your users have. So be open to feedback
from those you serve.

What tribes do you serve? That's mostly Ojibwe/Chippewa up there,
yes?

No...its a picture I took...its a lake that my town is named after (Bemidji)...I lowered the resolution way down as to make it load a little quicker...I still have the high-res version...but I am changing the layout...this one is too constrictive and I am missing a whole of information and with the current layout, making any room for additions will be a pain in the butt...as for putting more images and whatnot in...I guess...but I like reading...is there perhaps a different way for me to display all this text and not make it so scrunched up? I supposed using what real estate I have more efficiently would help and so that is what the new layout I am in the process of designing will hopefully be accomplished. Here are other links...http://nwioic.org/SecondGlancehttp://nwioic.org/AgentDrexhttp://nwioic.org/MIGC

Although I suggest to add an image to the active link, don't just leave a grey box.

Also your page code is not very well laid out. The major point of using CSS is to make sure that the search engines can get to the content of your site as soon as possible. You on the other hand have laid out the code same way as you would in the table based design. I didn't have the time to check all your code, as am working at the moment, but my advice would be to move the main content of your pages to the top of the page code. If you got your CSS righ, it should not influence the way the page shows.

I will try to remember to check your code once I get a moment and will see if there's anything I can help with.

Nightcat -- good point...I looked through the code and what you said about setting it up like a table-based page is so correct...I will follow your suggestion and make sure the next design has the main content at the top of the code...

Below is a post I used in another forum to a new web designer looking for a few good links to get him started. This has nothing to do about how well your site(s) look, just additional information you could possiblely use. Keep up the good work. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you are unable to come up with a web design... Use somebody else's! Here is a few websites with free open source web designs. free to use, modify and redistribute.
Open source, isn't it great?

First of all, more pictures will add bulk to your pages and will add to the amount of time that it takes for them to load. If you keep it all or mostly text, then good for you. That's smart web design. Pretty is nice for broadband users only. Text will offer a nice website to all network speeds. (Look at Google, which is the most popular search engine in the world.) For instance, your background image is 104 KB. Dial-up users will see this page at 56 kbps, which is about 7 KB per second at a maximum speed. At 7 KB per second, the background image alone would take around 14 sec to load and not even a second more for the rest of the page to load. You should design your page to load in under 10 seconds.

Second, do not use a table structure. This is being phased out and should not be used at all. It's easier to use a table structure, but you should actually be using CSS. Read up on positioning and formatting with Cascading Style Sheets.

Third, test your pages in both FireFox and Internet Explorer. The majority of users surf the net with Internet Explorer, but FireFox is generally used by the IT professionals. Aside from that, FireFox follows the standards that have been set, whereas Internet Explorer makes its own rules. With that said, however, Microsoft is moving Internet Explorer more toward the standards, so your pages will be more likely to work with Internet Explorer 8, if you code them to look proper in FireFox.